Adeena Karasickis an American poet
and media-artist and the author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory,
most recently, This Poem,
(Talonbooks, 2012)—which you can watch her read from on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjknfvH8gB0.
Four of her “videopoems” are regularly showcased at Film Festivals worldwide. Her
work is marked with an urban, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges
linguistic habits and normative modes of meaning production. Engaged with the
art of combination and turbulence of thought, it is a testament to the creative
and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing
meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. Karasick’s poetic practices
reflect her elaborate academic background and interests. Karasick earned an MA
in Semiotics at York University, and a Ph.D from Concordia University focusing
on the intersection between deconstructionist and Kabbalistic hermeneutics. She
is internationally recognized for her intellectual leadership in the discipline
of poetics and theory, and the intersection between divergent modes of
communication. Her scholarship has focused on the development of meaning, with
special attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, Derrida and L-A=N=G=U=A-G=E
theorists; on the historical relationship between modes of communication and
sociocultural phenomena; on the impact of new technologies and media on
language practice; on popular culture phenomena including television, film,
feminism, Conceptual Art and Kabbalah. For more, see her complete bio on the Fordham University siteHERE and check out her home site at http://www.adeenakarasick.com/

Adeena Karasick's FRAGMENT:

not what the siren sang but what the frag me[a]nt(bpNichol)

Whether
using it to denote all that is absent or elliptic or broken,

the
fragment foregrounds how everything is always already

broken
from something and the fragment inside the fragment infinitely explodes

with
all potential meaning.

Composed in the style of Facebook updates
or extended tweets, This Poem (Talonbooks, 2012) is a collision of
fragments. Mashing up the lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Whitman, the
contemporary financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Derrida and flckr streams; fragments
of post-consumerist culture, it documents contradictory trrrnds, threads,
webbed networks of information, the language of the ‘ordinary” and the otherness
of daily carnage, erupting as a kinda self-reflexive deeply satiric archive of
fragments, updates, analysis, aggregates, treatise, advice and precepts.

The fragment allows not for a desensification but reminds us of how we are
always engaged in a kind of euphoric recycling of information (shards, sparks)
and how we are continually reinvented through recontextualization. And consumed
with an ever-elusive search for definition, rerouted through infinite collisions,
juxtapositions of defamiliarity, and asked to re-evaluate how we process
information.

Recent
collaborations with Maria Damon, Intertextile
Text in Exile, Shmata Mash Up / A Jewette for Two Voicespublished in Open Letter (Collaborations Issue) and Habits of Being (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), explores the
rag inside the frag--

the text
as textile interwoven; text in exile, textatic;

is ribbed
woven linen limning outlining the materiality of the sentence, s’entrance –

Because
what is a shmata but a fragment?

a rag,
towel, washcloth, headcovering -- that which is ripped tattered worn.

Interestingly,
with the addition of an apostrophe

Shma’ata is also the text

and
thus really foregrounding how inevitably the text

is
always comprised of fragments, broken, torn

Always
already ripped off

stretched
out in the minutia of ouisie locutia

all
ambiphractured and hemistiched

saying
the unsayable,waving towards and
calling forth

all
that is not present but resonant and echoic

palimpsested
in a pool of reverberantslips.

Interestingly,
it turns out that with an addition of an “a,” Shemata –

actually
means to drop, let slip, slippage; fragment

So, shmata engraved in slippery ellipsis
oullipian slippage, full of cuts, scission derisions, elision; shattered,
tattered reminds us how through the fragmentation of the words

the world
explodes.

**

Further
focus on the fragment most recently, is with my Salomé project

opening a space where she (as an apocryphal
figure) is not repeatedly victimized, scapegoated and silenced, but occupies a
new arena of polyvocality, transgression and desire

The fragment offers an openness not only to say
the unsayable but to actively interact with the apostrophic silence reminding
us its never silent but salient, resounding with all that is not said. And through
the mash-ups and interventions, juxtapositions of conflicting discourse, the
fragment allows a freedom from constraint, borders orders laws, flaws codes; a
coterie of otherness, urges us to traverse new territories (because
the map is never the territory), terror stories,

Circuits by Jennifer K Dick, Corrupt Press 2013

240pp on translation in the wide range of the social sciences today. Available for order and reviewing (click image) from the Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, Paris. The articles collected here originated in a conference held in Paris at the EHESS in summer 2009.

IVY WRITERS PARIS bilingual reading series founded by JK Dick and M Noteboom

TRANSMISIBILITY AND CULTURAL TRANSFER: DIMENSIONS OF TRANSLATION IN THE HUMANITIES, click to order

Click 4 Tears in the Fence Magazine, UK. I write a reg column in each issue for them!

“The only literary magazine in the UK that lets the margins and the great tradition speak. It is a book to treasure.”-- Ketaki Kushari Dyson on issue 57. ISSUE N° 59 will be out in April 2014, order now!

Click image for NEW SITE, FEB 2014. FYI: Versal has been called “edgy” “urgent” and “evocative” (--Robyn Campbell) It is “a thoughtful collection of sophisticated, inventive writing and art.”—Cara Bigony, New Pages. Order by clicking image